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moon_custafer) wrote2018-03-22 01:22 pm
In which I continue to obsess over Inspector Lohmann
Karl Lohmann was first created, so far as I can tell, by Lang, Von Harbou, and the rest of the scriptwriters for M (1931), as a fictionalized version of real-life Berlin police detective Ernst Gennat. While M is famous as Peter Lorre’s breakout movie, apparently Otto Wernike’s performance was popular enough that Lang brought him and his character back in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which is thus a sequel to M as well as a sequel to Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922).
When Lang made The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), he cast Gert Fröbe as a Lohmann-like police inspector, who is, however, named Inspector Kras – not sure if there were copyright issues with Lohmann, or if Lang figured there was no way Mabuse’s nemesis wouldn’t be dead or retired nearly thirty years later (Wernicke was still alive, but I think he’d retired from acting in the 1950s after a serious on-set injury). Thousand Eyes was followed by several non-Lang Mabuse films, in the first of which Fröbe returns as basically the same character, only now he *is* named inspector Lohmann.
Then, sometime in the 1980s and 90s, a writer named Jack Gerson did a series of Inspector Lohmann mystery novels – this version is named Ernst, rather than Karl, and seems to be a combination of the character in Lang’s movies and his real-life inspiration. The book Lohmann also, after the first novel, has to escape the Nazis and the later books have him solving murders in England.
Oh, and Ernst Gennat himself shows up without the serial numbers filed off in the Inspector Gereon Rath books, graphic novel, and I think the tv series (Babylon Berlin) as well.
Got all that? I thought I had, but then I realized there had been two different authors writing Inspector Lohmann novels: Jack Gerson wrote: Death’s Head, Berlin (1988, originally a 1987 drama on BBC radio with Bob “Clever Girl!” Peck as Lohmann), Death Squad London (1989), and Deathwatch ’39 (1991). More recently John Steven Anderson wrote The Berlin Murder Squad: A Novel of 1923 (2005).
I think there are some semi-pro Mabuse fan films from around 2012 in which a version of the character appears as well.
Am I the only one who finds this odd? I mean, it’s as if Lt. Colombo were *not* a well-known fictional character, but once you began googling the name, you realized he’d appeared in multiple works by different people, usually several decades apart. It’s as if every appearance from the first one on were fan-fiction, because a bunch of different writers all thought “hey, am I the only one who liked that character? Think I’ll put him in my new work.”
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That's amazing. I knew Lohmann appeared in the two Lang films, but I had no idea he'd had such an afterlife.
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I looked up the cast and would venture a guess that “Inspector Carney” (Howard Da Silva) is another Lohmann doppelgänger.
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I imagine he'd have been very good as such. I keep meaning to see what movie because what the hell, then I keep worrying I'll spend the whole time disappointed because it's not Peter Lorre.
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